Lexical diversity and lexical density description of news written by journalism student

ABSTRACT The aim of this study is to quantitatively describe the lexical richness in informative news articles written by journalism students through indicators of lexical diversity and lexical density. A comparative analysis of a corpus of news articles written by two groups of undergraduate students (first and fourth year) and a group of graduate journalists was performed. In order to compare the corpora, measures of lexical density and diversity were used while statistical tests were applied to analyze differences between the groups. Though results show differences, it is density the indicator where statistically significant differences were found. This would indicate that despite students having a command of a wide and varied lexis, the informative level and communicative capacity of their texts are insufficient compared to the requirements at a professional level.